ChetOS.net

Does the style of music convey meaning?  Is there meaning in music beyond the words themselves?

This is something I have wondered for a long time.  There just seems to be something dark about heavy metal, forget the words.  Is it simply a style, that can be yolked with "Christian" lyrics at will?  Is music art?  I believe it is.

Art conveys a philosophy, a worldview.  This fact is not really disputed, and is how someone can look at art and try to discern what the artist was communicating.  If it is not possible to discern the meaning in a work of art, then "art appreciation" is meaningless.  Art is considered intellectually enriching.  We get the cliche "A picture is worth a thousand words..." because the work of art is full of information.

What the artist thinks is real (ontology), what the artist thinks is important and, traditionally, beautiful, impact the nature of his work.

Now, does art simply convey meaning in the subject of the work (i.e., is it only the drawn/sculpted object that is important), or does the decision to express it in a particular genre (like still life, pastoral, fantastic, etc), or movement/style (like cubism, expressionism, realism) matter as well?

The styles reflect a set of ideas.  You can determine what those ideas are (to a point), by following the history of a style, and the reasons it evolved (read the Wikipedia article on Futurism for a case study).  I am not an aesthetist, so I don't know exactly how culture influences art, but I know that it does.  Art movements are a product of their culture, for example, with the rise of Postmodernism, we see that art picks up some traits of that philosophy such as chance (randomness), anarchy (no standards), process (uncomplete art), "antiform" (using circles when lines would normally be used).  I am not good at actually critiquing art, but I understand the basic concepts.

A art critic will take the subject matter, the physical material, the genre, and the style, and attempt to figure out what the artist means (I am not considering the deconstructionist critic's methods, because they don't believe the artist's meaning is relevant (which is itself another expression of anarchy in Postmodernism)).

So, if music is art, and the style and genre of art conveys meaning, that means that a musical work's style and genre convey meaning as well.

If music is art, then we have a problem.  If style and genre convey meaning in music, we need to carefully consider what we are conveying when we hook Christian lyrics (the subject of the work) to a particular style and genre.

Can there be "Christian rock", or "Christian death-metal", I don't know; I haven't decided.  What about psychedelic music?  That style of music was specifically designed to disengage the mind, doesn't that matter?

All I am saying is that I no longer buy the argument that only the words matter.

I haven't posted much, just don't have the time or the energy.

Visual Studio 2010 CTP is available, it is a Virtual PC image (which is nice in some ways because it doesn't mess your computer up), but it is a few GB download.